I saw these posters featured in Martha Stewart Living this month and fell inlove with them. I'm ordering three for the kitchen! Yay!
You can order them off of Joe Seppi's Etsy shop. Click on the
link to go there directly.
Last year (after many friends recommended it to me) I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's book,
"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - A Year of Food Life." I loved this book. Seriously. It is one of my favorite all-time books. I loved how she and her family decided to move back to Kentucky and spend a year living off the land. One of my favorite parts of her book is when she looks at the women's movement vs the lack of "real" food on dinner tables. She says this:
"I understand that most U.S. citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to a generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of the shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs AND still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.
"It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. "Hey ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO. We came a long way baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of every culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.
"....Now what? Most of us, male or female, work at full-time jobs that seem organized around a presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack - filling the gap between school and workday's end, doing errands only possible during business hours... but in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to cover the mortgage and health insurance.... In fact gal Friday is us, both moms and dads running on overdrive, smashing the caretaking duties into small spaces between job and carpool and bedtime. Eating processed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health.
"....Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out fresh ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. In France and Spain I've sat in business meetings with female journalists and editors in which the conversation veered sharply from postcolonial literature to fish markets and the quality of this year's mushrooms or leeks. These women had no apparent concern about sounding unliberated; in the context of a healthy food culture, fish and leeks are as respectable as postcolonial literature. (And arguably more fun.)"
I could keep going but then I'd just have to write the entire book! This was copyrighted in 2007 - so before I was reading or following any food blogs. I do think that times are changing -- at least here in Los Angeles. I see farmer's markets popping up everywhere and CSA programs as well. I do think people have noticed that when you eat crap you feel like crap and you turn into crap. So it's much better to start eating well so you can feel well.
I just read today online about a guy, Ivan Royster, who was tired of the High Fructose Corn Syrup taking over and started a facebook page about it (which I joined awhile ago). Here's a snippet of the article: (you can read the entire article
here)
“One day, about a year ago, my nephew came over,” Royster told Organic Connections. “We were just playing as usual. Then he told me something shocking: his friend’s mom had taught him how to give his eight-year-old friend insulin shots because his friend has type 2 diabetes. I know that when I was growing up, type 2 diabetes was unheard of in children—it was more of an older person’s disease.
“That was what made me look more into the situation. I started doing some research on high-fructose corn syrup, and I noticed that it was a main ingredient in lots of the baby formulas and in baby foods in general that Americans buy simply on brand appeal—just off of reputation. The more I found out, the more I personally thought that there might be a link between high-fructose corn syrup and type 2 diabetes. Even though it’s not proven, there are also many respectable scientists and professionals that agree this link might exist.”
Royster’s research revealed that type 2 diabetes in children and young adults didn’t really come to prominence until 2002 and later. High-fructose corn syrup hit the mainstream in 1996. He had read a book called Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey Smith, which detailed that the reason rats were used in many laboratory tests was that 90 days of a rat’s life roughly equaled 10 years of a human’s life. Royster discovered that there had been tests done on rats in which they were given high-fructose corn syrup and 90 days later they manifested type 2 diabetes. It was 6 years after high-fructose corn syrup was broadly released in America that type 2 diabetes began to show up in children.
“I put that together and I said, ‘Man, either this is just coincidence or this is something that needs to be looked into further,’” Royster related. “I then learned that in the last year or two, three major research studies from prominent universities found that HFCS is causing and linked to all types of diseases, such as gout in men, obesity, type 2 diabetes, liver scarring, NASH [nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, liver inflammation caused by a buildup of fat in the liver], and even psoriasis of the liver. A Duke medical researcher’s paper published about three weeks ago said, and I quote, ‘Nowadays we are seeing kids with the same livers as lifelong alcoholics.’ They studied about 300 kids with no history or family history of liver disease and found that a percentage of them did have this liver scarring disease.
“I feel as if HFCS is a threat to human health and is something that should, at least, have a warning on it. I say that if people knew this, they wouldn’t buy it.”
I've heard that HFCS is banned in Europe, but that is not the full truth. It is not banned. But it is subject to a production quota. That said, you can't find a lot of it over there. And you can find way more fresh fruits and vegetables in people's homes.
I'm not perfect. We have items with HFCS in it. We eat out at McDonald's sometimes. But I really try hard to have a good balance of good, nutritional foods with the bad ones as well. I have my CSA box that comes twice a month and insist that my kids eat something healthy if they eat something unhealthy. For example, last night my son wanted corn dogs for dinner. So he got those as well as a big bowl of vegetable soup that I made on Monday night. He was fine with that exchange. We talk about how food can hurt us or make us big and strong. It's up to us to decide what kind of body we want to live in.
Okay, enough of my ranting about one of my favorite subjects. Just remember EAT REAL FOOD!
Enjoy!
